Benedetto Croce

Italian philosopher, historian, and critic. He lived mostly in Naples, devoting himself to studying and writing. He founded and edited [1903-44] Critica, a review of literature, history, and philosophy, which in 1944 became Quademi Della Critica. Croce was made a senator in 1910 and was minister of education [1920-21]. A staunch opposer of Fascism, he lived in retirement until 1943, when he became a leader of the Liberal party. Croce's system of philosophy is related to the idealistic school in that spirit, monistic in manifestation, constitutes the only reality. The general title of the work presenting his system is Philosophy of the Spirit [1902-17]; tr. 1909-21], which is divided into four parts, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, Logic as the Science of Pure Concept, Philosophy of the Practical, and History: Its Theory and Practice. Among his other works are A History of Italy, 1871-1915 [1927; t r. 1929] and History as the Story of Liberty [1938; tr. 1941] . . . . [Harris, William H., and Judith S. Levey, eds. The New Columbia Encyclopedia. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1975.]

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Croce conceives of aesthetics as a general linguistics because its concern is with all expressive media, all forms of human symbol-construction, the paradigm of which is language. He thus sets the outlook of most twentieth-century philosophies of art which replace the concept of beauty with that of expression, or identify beauty, as Croce does, with expression.

Art, Croce maintains, is one of the major forms of the human spirit, the work of spirit in its aesthetical aspect. Spirit manifests itself as well in a logical and a practical synthesis, the latter exhibiting itself in the economic and moral activities of man. Croce refers to these various aspects of spirit as "the circle of spiritual activity." At the foundation of all knowledge is art, for intuitions, the stuff of art, precede concepts.

In his analysis of intuition Croce identifies it with expression and maintains that the externalization of intuition is secondary to its appearance in the consciousness of the artist. It is on this ground--that expression is meaningful apart from its embodiment or projection in a work of art--that Croce has been most severely criticized. The content of expression itself derives from the impressions which the mind gathers from practical life, i.e., from its impulses, its desires, and its sensory awareness. The intuitions, then, which make up the artist's consciousness are the product of feeling on the one hand and images on the other. These are brought together and fused in the unity of lyrical expression. The artistic integrity of lyrical expression is due to the pervasiveness of feeling in it: because of feeling, an image can become an intuition. With this achievement art becomes a symbol of feeling.

"What gives coherence and unity to the intuition is feeling: the intuition is really such because it represents a feeling, and can only appear from and upon that. Not the idea, but the feeling, is what confers upon art the airy lightness of the symbol: an aspiration enclosed in the circle of representation--that is art: and in it the aspiration alone stands for the representation, and the representation alone for the aspiration." Croce's position clearly contains the doctrine which has been developed by Susanne Langer: art is a symbol of feeling.

The essay included here is the article on "Aesthetics" the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is Croce's most concise presentation of his position. For a fuller discussion, the reader is referred to The Breviary of Aesthetics.

AESTHETICS [From ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 14th Edition] / Croce:
"If we examine a poem in order to determine what it is that makes us feel it to be a poem, we at once find two constant and necessary elements: a complex of images, and a feeling that animates them . . . . Moreover, these two elements may appear as two in a first abstract analysis, but they cannot be regarded as two distinct threads, however intertwined; for, in effect, the feeling is altogether converted into images, into this complex of images, and is thus a feeling that is contemplated and therefore resolved and transcended. Hence poetry must be called neither feeling, nor image, nor yet the sum of the two, but "contemplation of feeling" or "lyrical intuition" [which is the same thing] "pure intuition" - pure, that is, of all historical and critical reference to the reality or unreality of the images of which it is woven, and apprehending the pure throb of life in its ideality. Doubtless, other things may be found in poetry besides these two elements or moments and the synthesis of the two; but these other things are either present as extraneous elements in a compound [reflections, exhortations, polemics, allegories, etc.], or else they are just these image-feelings themselves taken in abstraction from their context as so much material, restored to the condition in which it was before the act of poetic creation . . . . What has been said of "poetry" applies to al the other "arts" commonly enumerated; painting, sculpture, architecture, music . . . . By defining art as lyrical or pure intuition we have implicitly distinguished it from all other forms of mental production. If such distinctions are made explicit, we obtain the following negations:

1. Art is not philosophy, because philosophy is the logical thinking of the universal categories of being, and art is the unreflective intuition of being. Hence, while philosophy transcends the image and uses it for its own purposes, art lives in it as in a kingdom. It is said that art cannot behave in an irrational manner and cannot ignore logic; and certainly it is neither irrational nor illogical; but its own rationality, its own logic, is a quite a different thing from the dialectical logic of the concept, and it was in order to indicate this peculiar and unique character that the name "logic of sense" or "aesthetic" was invented. The not uncommon assertion that art has a logical character, involves either an equivocation between conceptual logic and aesthetic logic, or a symbolic expression of the later in terms of the former.

2. Art is not history, because history implies the critical distinction between reality and unreality; the reality of the passing moment and the reality of a fancied world: the reality of fact and the reality of desire. For art, these distinctions are as yet unmade; it lives, as we have said, upon pure images. The historical existence of Helenus, Andromache and Aeneas makes no difference to the poetical quality of Virgil's poem. Here, too, an objection has been raised: namely that art is not wholly indifferent to historical criteria, because it obeys the laws of "verisimilitude"; but, here again, "verisimilitude" is only a rather clumsy metaphor for the mutual coherence of images, which without this internal coherence would fail to produce their effect as images, like Horace's delphinus in silvis and aper in fluctibus.

3. Art is not natural science, because natural science is historical fact classified and so made abstract; nor is it mathematical science, because mathematics performs operations with abstractions and does not contemplate. The analogy sometimes drawn between mathematical and poetical creation is based on merely external and generic resemblances; and the alleged necessity of a mathematical or geometrical basis of the arts is only another metaphor, a symbolic expression of the constructive, cohesive and unifying force of the poetic mind building itself a body of images.

4. Art is not the play of fancy, because the play of fancy passes from image to image, in search of variety, rest or diversion, seeking to amuse itself with the likenesses of things that give pleasure or have an emotional and pathetic interest; whereas in art the fancy is so dominated by the single problem of converting chaotic feeling into clear intuition, that we recognize the propriety of ceasing to call it fancy and calling it imagination, poetic imagination or creative imagination . . . .

5. Art is not feeling in its immediacy . . . . Feelings in their immediacy are "expressed" for if they were not, if they were not also sensible and bodily facts ["psycho-physical phenomena," as the positivists used to call them] they would not be concrete things, and so they would be nothing at all . . . . But "expression" in this sense, even when accompanied by consciousness, is a mere metaphor from " mental" or "aesthetic expression" which alone really expresses, that is, gives to feeling a theoretical form and converts it into words, song and outward shape. This distinction between contemplated feeling or poetry, and feeling enacted or endured, is the source of the power, ascribed to art, of "liberating us from the passions" and "calming" us [the power of catharsis], and of the consequent condemnation, from an aesthetic point of view, of works of art, or parts of them, in which immediate feeling has a place or finds a vent. Hence, too, arises another characteristic of poetic expression--really synonymous with the last--namely its "infinity" as opposed to the "finitude" of immediate feeling or passion; or, as it is also called, the "universal" or "cosmic" character of poetry. Feeling, not crushed but contemplated by the work of poetry, is seen to diffuse itself in widening circles over all the realm of the soul, which is the realm of the universe, echoing and re-echoing endlessly: joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, energy and lassitude, earnestness and frivolity, and so forth, are linked to each other and lead to each other through infinite shades and gradations; so that the feeling, while preserving its individual physiognomy and its original dominating motive, is not exhausted by or restricted to this original character. A comic image, if it is poetically comic, carries with it something that is not comic, as in the case of Don Quixote or Falstaff; and the image of something terrible is never, in poetry, without an atoning element of loftiness, goodness and love.

6. Art is not ins ruction or oratory: it is not circumscribed and limited by service to any practical purpose whatever, whether this be the inculcation of a particular philosophical, historical or scientific truth, or the advocacy of a particular way of feeling and the action corresponding to it. Oratory at once robs expression of its "infinity" and independence, and, by making it the means to an end, dissolves it in this end. Hence arises what Schiller called the "non-determining" character of art, as opposed to the "determining" character of oratory; and hence the justifiable suspicion of "political poetry" -political poetry being, proverbially, bad poetry.

7. As art is not to be confused with the form of practical action most akin to it, namely instruction and oratory, so a fortiori, it must not be confused with other forms directed to the production of certain effects, whether these consist in pleasure, enjoyment and utility, or in goodness and righteousness. We must exclude from art not only meretricious works, but also those inspired by a desire for goodness, as equally, though differently, inartistic and repugnant to lovers of poetry. Flaubert's remark that indecent books lacked vérité, is parallel to Voltaire's gibe that certain "poésies sacrées" were really "sacrées, car personne n'y touche."